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Are there any updates on procedural cities, like making ArcCorp cover the entire planet?

TL;DRThe goal is to build cities quickly from modular pieces with a portion of bespoke items on top, which is necessary for hundreds of planets, and early work has begun on reworking one existing city.

Brian ChambersDevelopment Director, Foundry 42 Frankfurt

Well, it's not really any secret when you look at what we're doing on procedural planets and the tool sets we have, and you think about what we've talked about on design and how we're making our design as modular as we can and having these modular pieces, right? So the ultimate goal, or at least a portion of the goal, is in a sense to be able to combine those two with the tool set that we have to where we can lay out a city fairly quick. And imagine laying it out with base geometry within these modular set pieces. But then maybe on top there's, rough numbers, 10 to 20 percent of bespoke items that are around there that help break it up. So yeah, that's ultimately where we're going with it. And it's not even because we think it would be cool or like, oh, this is what we want to do. We have to do it that way if we're going to have 300-plus planets. And if these things are going to be populated in a way that is going to promote people to go and explore and play and shoot and mine and craft and blah, blah, blah, we need the ability to quickly generate these cities on the terrain and also to quickly give them their unique flavor. Progress is going good. Designers are working every day. I think some of the first that's going on that is in its preliminary stages was reworking Levski and everything onto the proper procedural moon that we just showed some images of in ATV. So the design team here looking at the modular pieces, working with the environment artists here, looking at Levski, boom, and that's exactly what they did. Put the parts and pieces together, take another 15, 20 percent of bespoke items on top of it, and all of a sudden it feels and looks like it lives there and it belongs there, which is pretty cool.

Happy Hour›Interview w/ Brian Chambers·
Published on this date.5 May 2017